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Creative Sparks Arise from Opportunistic Innovation

Source of book image:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51vovIVI5sL.jpg

(p. D16) One of the insights of “Strategic Intuition” is that business makes progress by following the opportunistic innovation model, while governments and international-aid agencies aim repetitively at rigid social goals. Such rigidity happens partly for a reason that Mr. Duggan is too polite to mention — bureaucrats, by nature, rarely give off a creative spark. Mr. Duggan prefers to emphasize a structural cause: The public demands solutions to problems of great social importance; thus bureaucrats get stuck with fixed objectives. Yet Mr. Duggan also shows that social progress often happens by emulating the opportunism of business. Among the most powerful of his examples is Muhammad Yunus’s invention of microcredit.
. . .
If there are still businessmen who feel compelled to follow a fixed-goal plan — missing out on the profits of opportunistic flexibility — then at least there is the free market to punish them. Market feedback is surely one big reason that we have so many innovative entrepreneurs. Where the old approach does most of the damage is in social policy, where the feedback is either fuzzy (as in domestic policy) or absent (foreign aid). Social policy could use a lot fewer commencement speakers and a lot more creative sparkers.

For the full review, see:
WILLIAM EASTERLY. “BOOKSHELF; Surprised by Opportunity.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., November 14, 2007): D16.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The reference to the Stratetic Intuition book is:
Duggan, William. Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Market Prices Send “the Right Signal to the Customer to Save Energy”

In the passage quoted below, the “commission” refers to China’s “National Development and Reform Commission.”

(p. A6) The commission estimates China’s energy efficiency is about 10% below that of developed countries because of obsolete technology. But many experts say Beijing’s policy priorities are a bigger obstacle.
Worries about social unrest and inflation led Beijing to put the brakes on pricing overhauls, at tremendous cost to state refiners PetroChina Co. and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., known as Sinopec.
“Market prices are a very important and key issue because they send out the right signal to the customer to save energy,” said Yang Fuqiang, vice president of the Energy Foundation in Beijing.

For the full story, see:
David Winning. “Why Energy Efficiencies Prove Elusive in China.” Wall Street Journal (Tues., Nov. 6, 2007): A6.

Blindly Imitating a False Vision of Ancient Sculpture

“Trojan Archer from the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead railed against the mindless imitation of the classics, as embodied for instance in the Parthenon. In sculpture there has also been blind imitation of white classical figures, such as one that has recently been installed next to the Arts and Sciences Building on my campus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
One imagines that Rand and Roark would have been amused by the article quoted below, that shows that the classical sculptures were actually rich in color.

(p. D8) The Venus de Milo: white. The Apollo Belvedere: white. The Barberini Faun: white. The passing centuries may have cast their pall of grime, yet ever since the Renaissance rediscovered antiquity, our Platonic ideal of classical statuary has been bare marble: bleached, bone white.
The Greeks and Romans did not see it that way. The current show “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity” — through Jan. 20 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum on Harvard University’s campus — makes a bold attempt to set the record straight. On view are replicas painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: pulverized malachite (green), azurite (blue), arsenic compounds (yellow, orange), cinnabar or “dragon’s blood” (red), as well as charred bone and vine (black). At first glance and quite a while after, the unaccustomed palette strikes most viewers as way over the top. But few would deny that these novelties — archers, goddesses, mythic beasts — look you straight in the eye.
. . .
By the 18th century, practitioners of the then-new science of archaeology were aware that the ancients had used color. But Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the German prefect of antiquities at the Vatican, preferred white. His personal taste was enshrined by fiat as the “classical” standard. And so it remained, unchallenged except by the occasional eccentric until the late 20th century.

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW GUREWITSCH. “CULTURAL CONVERSATION With Vinzenz Brinkman; Setting the Record Straight About Classical Statues’ Hues.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., December 4, 2007): D8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

For-Profit Schools Teach Math Better than Non-Profit or Government Schools

(p. A23) When for-profit management of public schools was first proposed in Philadelphia six years ago, many in that city were extremely skeptical, if not aggressively hostile. So the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the innovation, gave only the 30 lowest performing schools to for-profit companies, while another 16 were given to nonprofit organizations, including two of the city’s major universities (Temple and the University of Pennsylvania). Others were reorganized by the school district itself.
In effect, a competition was run among the three types of management — for-profit, nonprofit, and government-run. Four years into the race, here are the results: Students at schools managed by for-profit firms were roughly six months ahead in math than would be expected had the schools remained in the hands of the school district. In reading, students in schools managed by for-profit firms were two months further along than they would have been if the schools had been under district control, though that difference was not large enough to give us statistical certainty. Meanwhile the nonprofits — and the school district’s own reorganized schools — did no better than expected.
. . .
Though we believe our methodology to be state of the art, our findings will nonetheless be controversial, because they contradict a prior study by the RAND Corp. in February, which found no impact of private management on student performance. The RAND study, however, failed to separate out the schools managed by the for-profit firms from those managed by the nonprofit organizations. In our study, too, management effects are nil when the two are mixed together, as the positive impacts of for-profit firms are canceled out by the negative impacts of nonprofit organizations.

For the full commentary, see:
Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. Chingos. “Educational Rewards.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., Nov. 7, 2007): A23.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Lomborg Shows How Kyoto Protocol Wastes Money

Source of book image:
http://images.tdaxp.com/tdaxp_upload/cool_it_md.jpg

(p. D7) Standing in the practical middle is Bjorn Lomborg, the free-thinking Dane who, in “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (2001), challenged the belief that the environment is going to pieces. Mr. Lomborg is now back with “Cool It,” a book brimming with useful facts and common sense.
Mr. Lomborg–“liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace,” as he describes himself–is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.
. . .
Mr. Lomborg cites studies showing that by implementing Kyoto–at a cost of trillions of dollars–we might be able to achieve a 3% reduction in fluvial and coastal flooding damages. If we instead adopted smart flood policies–e.g., an end to public subsidies that encourage people to settle in flood plains, a shrewder use of levees–we could achieve a 91% reduction in damages at a fraction of the Kyoto cost.

For the full review, see:
KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL. “BOOKSHELF; A Calm Voice in a Heated Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, September 13, 2007): D7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Danger of “Misconceived Pessimism”

In the full version of the commentary quoted below, the authors mention four lines of research that they believe hold promise for the future: vaccines, epigenetics, targeted therapies, and cancer “stem cells.”

(p. A17) This week, the National Cancer Institute, in conjunction with other organizations that track cancers, reported that the death rate from cancer declined from 2002-2004 by an average of 2.1% per year. This is an improvement over the 1.1% annual declines from 1993-2002 and is very good news indeed. Each 1% decline represents 5,000 people living rather than dying, and, of course, this figure is compounded each year.
While some part of the declining death rate from cancer is the consequence of screening, much is the result of greatly improved treatments. And we believe that the successes achieved to date are only the modest beginning of a revolution in the research into and treatment of cancer.
During the last half of the 20th century, almost all treatments of cancers involved forms of chemotherapy in which cancerous and normal tissues were bombarded with nonselective cytoxic drugs. These drugs killed all cells, healthy as well as malignant. Worse, they did not kill all cancer cells, so the cancer progressed — leading to the pessimism dominant in people’s minds today, a reflection of years of articles and opinion pieces in the popular press expressing the view that “the war on cancer” has been waged incorrectly, if not lost.
Now, however, new therapeutic modes are in play, based on better understandings of cancers and great advances in technologies.
. . .
The danger is that misconceived pessimism might result in a loss of popular moral support for the revolutionary new approaches to cancer research and treatment.

For the full commentary, see:
Samuel Waxman and Richard Gambino. “The New Ways We Fight Cancer.” Wall Street Journal (Oct 18, 2007): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Lower Taxes Encourage Entrepreneurship in Ireland

“Feargal Mooney, left, is chief operating officer for Web Reservations International. Ray Nolan is the founder and chief executive officer. Web Reservations provides booking and management for hostels that cater to economy travelers.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) DUBLIN — Ireland is now alive with enthusiasm for entrepreneurs, who seemingly rank just below rock stars in popularity.
. . .
The relatively new emphasis on entrepreneurs in Ireland is the culmination of nearly four decades of government policies that have lifted the economy from centuries of poverty to modern prosperity.
The change began when Ireland entered the European Union in 1973. In subsequent years, the government rewrote its tax policies to attract foreign investment by American corporations, made all education free through the university level and changed tax rates and used direct equity investment to encourage Irish people to set up their own businesses.
“The change came in the 1990s,” said James Murphy, founder and managing director of Lifes2Good, a marketer of drugstore products for muscle aches, hair loss and other maladies. “Taxes and interest rates came down, and all of a sudden we believed in ourselves.”
The new environment also encouraged Ray Nolan, who founded Raven Computing in 1989 to provide software for lawyers to keep track of billable hours. He sold that company and founded another that created software for companies to manage billing and receipts. And in 1999, he founded Web Reservations International to provide booking and property management for hostels that cater to backpackers and economy travelers.
“Hostel owners needed to keep track of people sharing rooms, and bookings for Americans coming to Dublin for three nights,” said Feargal Mooney, chief operating officer of Web Reservations. “Hostel accommodations go for 10 to 20 euro a night,” he said, or $15 to $30 at today’s exchange rates, “so booking reservations in them wasn’t profitable for the big travel companies.”

For the full story, see:
JAMES FLANIGAN. “ENTREPRENEURIAL EDGE; Ireland Uses Incentives To Help Start-Ups Flourish.” The New York Times (Thurs., January 17, 2008): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Creative Destruction in the Film Industry

(p. B1) While film still is central in big Hollywood features, it’s unclear how long it will be before even the biggest feature movies go all- digital. The buzz in technical movie-making circles these days involves the two-month-old, ultra-high-resolution digital Red camera. Boosters say it looks nearly as good as 35mm film — and costs around $30,000, or about the same as renting a 35mm camera for 10 days.
Thanks to cheap computers, a similar sort of creative destruction is happening everywhere in the industry. Color adjustment used to require expensive oscilloscope-like monitors. It first moved to specialized — and expensive — software, but lately it’s done with relatively low- cost (say, $200) “plug-ins” by companies like Red Giant Software.

For the full story, see:
Lee Gomes. “Editing on Big Films Is Now Being Done On Small Computers.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., Oct. 24, 2007): B1.

“The Quiet Emergence of Pro-Nuke Greens”

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41hyNtYMzmL._SS500_.jpg

(p. D8) Start with a novelist and former New Yorker magazine fiction editor living on the East End of Long Island, a sometime antinuclear activist (remember Shoreham?) and a determined organic vegetable gardener who spent her childhood in 1950s New Mexico having atom-bomb nightmares. Team her with another lifelong greenie, a man with a doctorate in organic chemistry who grew up on an Idaho ranch without electricity and whose day job, over the course of a long career, has included pioneering something called probabilistic risk assessment (the underpinnings of climate-change analysis, but that’s another story). Send the pair off on a grand tour of the nuclear-power world, from dust-blown uranium mines to the depths of a pilot facility for Uncle Sam’s waste deposit at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. And then wait for them to come back with the predictable diatribe against nuclear power.
Happily, you’ll wait in vain. “Power to Save the World” is a picaresque, flat-out love song to the bad boy of the great American energy debate — as good a book as we’re likely to get on a subject mired in political incorrectness, general unfathomability and essentially limitless gut fears. It’s also the latest plot point for one of the few unassailably positive byproducts of global-warming mania: the quiet emergence of pro-nuke greens, led by such impeccable apostates as Whole Earth founder Stewart Brand and James Lovelock, the British chemist best known for his Earth-is-a-living-organism “Gaia ypothesis.”

For the full review, see:
Reiss, Spencer. “BOOKSHELF; Green With (Nuclear) Energy.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 20, 2007): D8.

“I Intend to Be Visible, But Only in Ways I Wish to Be Seen”

The passages below are from a WSJ summary of an October 12, 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

(p. A7) After feeling increasingly alienated by college celebrations of black heritage, English Prof. Jerald Walker opted to redefine his role on campus.
. . .
Prof. Walker decided he had had enough during a commencement ceremony for black students. He had misgivings over the concept itself: “After so recently celebrating our country’s staunchest promoter of integration, I was being asked to celebrate segregation.”
Afterward, he made the decision that he would no longer participate in events simply because of the color of his skin. “I intend to be visible,” he says, “but only in ways I wish to be seen.”

For the full summary, see:
“The Informed Reader; Universities; Black Professor Rebels Against Expected Campus Role.” Wall Street Journal (Oct. 13, 2007): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)